Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 17 Fall 1999

              Santayana's Bifurcationist
Theory of Time
The best way to enter deeply into a philosophical system is through its account
of the nature of time.1 This is especially true for Santayana's philosophical
system. He will be seen to hold a type of B-Theory of time that recognizes the
B-relations of precedence and simultaneity between events as objective but relegates
their A-determinations, consisting in their being intrinsically past, present, and
future, to the junkheap of mere subjective appearance. This results in a highly
bifurcationist philosophy in which the scientific image of a world stripped of all
properties that give human life a meaning turns out to be the true one and the
manifest or common sense image of the moral agent the false one. It will be shown,
furthermore* that the deep parting of the ways between Santayana and his illustrious
contemporaries, James, Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead, all A-Theory process
philosophers, is over the issue of bifurcationism, especially in regard to the nature of
time. The moral that is to be drawn from my story is that ultimate disagreements
between philosophers are due to their rival sentiments of rationality as to what
constitutes a rationally satisfying explanation of reality, with these men, in opposition
to Santayana, requiring that it be an anthropomorphic or humanistic one.2
To command a proper understanding of Santayana's theory of time it must be
seen how it contributes to the ultimate purpose of Santayana's philosophy. This is to
show us how to escape from a meaningless, workaday world, of ■
Santavana s
biologically-induced endeavorings, which is the standpoint of the   „„„„/_
moral agent intent on controlling the world, so that we can live
within the eternal present, something which we do by intuiting the timeless Platonic
essences and by being the spectator of all time and eternity. To achieve this form of
platonic and gnostic salvation we must learn to divest ourselves of the moral agent's
false, anthropomorphic view of reality, which is foisted on us by our animal nature.
As Santayana put it so eloquently, "It would seem idle from her [the workaday] point
of view, and rather mad, that any spirit should ever disengage itself from that process
and should come to find in it some satisfying essence, so that in discerning and
possessing this essence it might transcend that remorseless flux and might look away
from it to an eternal world" (rm vii).
Santayana was out of step with the spirit of his age. Whereas the pragmatists,
who were in touch with the underlying currents in American society, were red-
blooded, up-and-at-em, put-your-shoulder-to-the-wheel, and whistle-while-you-work
optimists, who wallowed in the perspective of the moral agent, itching to engage in a
Texas "death match" with evil, Santayana was a Schopenhauerian pessimist about
man's natural, biologically-based life. It is a grim, meaningless affair that is not to be
taken seriously, though it must be endured. But this pessimism was only a
transitional moment within Santayana's philosophy, since its ultimate purpose was to
free us from our biologically-based proclivity to make reality in our own image
anthropomorphically, thereby enabling us to rise up to the highest spiritual levels that
1 This paper was presented to the Santayana Society in Washington on December 28,1998.
21 will avail myself of Santayana's previously unpublished manuscripts in John and Shirley Lach's
Physical Order and Moral Liberty, but only for the purpose of filling in and expanding the published
accounts of time, primarily in Scepticism and Animal Faith and The Realms of Being.